As you may or may not have noticed, there was no Tarot Thursday post last week. I’m having some challenges with my host provider.

I’ve been with the same host provider for many years – since I started this website about eight years ago. I went with this host provider, rather than another one where I had other websites hosted, on the recommendation of a friend.

And for several years, everything was good. Last year, I had some problems. For several weeks, I was locked out of my site while I went back and forth with the “support” team. My CPU usage was too high for the shared hosting environment. I had to fix it. Only the “solutions” they gave created more problems, like locking me out.

Finally, after several weeks and lots of headaches and stress, we got it sorted. Or so I thought.

Now, I’m having the same problems again. I was locked out again for a short time last week.

According to the hosting support, the high CPU usage is coming from comment spam and brute force attacks against my site. In other words, hackers. And more importantly, events completely beyond my control. Except they expect me to fix it.

Or pay them a lot more money to move my site to dedicated hosting.

I’m fed up. I’m tired of rude support staff. I’m angry about being blamed for something beyond my control. I’m frustrated with my website being held hostage, or under threat of being held hostage.

I’ve reached out for help, and I’m beginning the process of moving Walks Within to a new host provider. If I’m offline for a while, that’s why. I hope to have everything back and running with minimal interruption. Keep your fingers crossed for me!